our changing countryside

The countryside is alive with the sound of pile drivers.  It's coming from the new solar farm, where they must still be at the stage of laying some kind of foundations, although the noise bounces off the wood so that the source seems spread along the horizon.  They've already started by the time I go out in the morning to let the chickens out, and were still hard at work today after it got dark, to judge from the bright lights in the field where the array's going to be.

The manager of the polytunnels venture appeared on the doorstep at lunchtime, holding an envelope and looking hunted.  He handed me the letter, said it was about the community consultation for the next phase of building, and hurried away.  I flicked through the document equally hurriedly, searching for a map or anything that would confirm where they wanted to put more tunnels, and handed the letter to the Systems Administrator, whose grasp of the geography of the farm is better than mine from taking all those country walks on afternoons when I was head down in a flowerbed.  The SA worked quickly and methodically through the pages with the air of someone accustomed to cutting through to the heart of service contract agreements, and not all like somebody who might be about to discover their home was going to irredeemably blighted, then said calmly that it was fine, the tunnels were going to be at the other end of the farm and would not be visible from our house.

The bomb had fallen, but had landed somewhere else, as the SA then remarked, suggesting an inner state less glacially calm and rather closer to mine than the outer one.  That is what it felt like. The new tunnels will cover 6.9 hectares, with a maximum height of 6.4 metres.  As the community consultation statement says, being a rural area there are scattered residential properties, the closest to the proposed development being 3 properties approximately 100m to the north and west, and 2 approximately 100m to the east.  Not ours.  But none of the owners of those five houses are going to be at all happy.

Living in the countryside does sometimes feel like taking part in the Charge of the Light Brigade, cannons to the left of them, cannons to the right of them.  Quarries, polytunnels, solar farms, windmills, more polytunnels.  We've escaped so far, but for how much longer?  Though the lettuce farm's letter says that if this goes ahead it will be the last phase of tunnel development on this farm, and they will look for alternative sites to achieve their aim of 40 hectares.  Forty hectares of salad tunnels?  That's an awful lot of bags of lambs lettuce.  The SA has always said that the field next to us was too small to be worth putting tunnels on, and the wrong shape, being roughly triangular, quite apart from the electricity lines going across it.  Still, I am terribly relieved to see it written down that they only want to build at the other end of the farm.  I don't know why the farm manager looked so worried when he saw me.  Probably that's his default position by now, since most of the neighbours must hate him.